September is when the laptops come back out. New school year, new devices, often a first phone or tablet — and for a lot of families it’s also the point where somebody sits down to sort out parental controls properly, having meant to do it since about last March.
The good news is that the built-in tools are genuinely capable now. Microsoft Family Safety and Apple Screen Time are both far better than the bolt-on filtering software of ten years ago, and they’re free. The bad news is that most home setups using them quietly stop working within a fortnight — not because the software failed, but because of where the controls were put.
Here’s how to set them up so they hold.
Why most parental control setups fail
Almost every DIY setup we see has the same shape: the parent goes through each device in turn, finds the restrictions menu, and switches things on. It’s a completely reasonable approach, and it has three predictable failure modes.
New devices arrive unprotected. Controls configured on a device only exist on that device. A birthday tablet, a hand-me-down laptop, a friend’s phone on your Wi-Fi — none of it is covered until somebody remembers to configure it.
Resets wipe everything. A factory reset, a Windows reinstall, or simply a new user account on the same machine clears the restrictions. Nothing warns you that it’s happened.
The child can turn them off. This is the big one. If the restrictions were set up under the child’s own account, with no separate parent password above them, then the person the controls apply to can also change them. Children work this out remarkably quickly.
None of these are fixed by choosing better software. They’re fixed by changing where the controls live.
The two kinds of control — and why you need both
There are really only two questions parental controls can answer, and different tools answer them.
“What can be reached from this house?” — that’s network-level filtering, applied at your router. It’s broad and automatic: it covers every device connecting through your home Wi-Fi, including ones you’ve never configured and ones you don’t own. It doesn’t care whether a device was just reset.
“What can this specific child do, and when?” — that’s device-level control: Microsoft Family Safety, Apple Screen Time. It’s detailed and personal — app age ratings, bedtime schedules, daily time limits, per-child settings that suit a nine-year-old differently from a fourteen-year-old.
Neither covers the other’s ground. Router filtering has no idea whose hands the iPad is in or what time it is for that particular child. Screen Time has no idea a new device just joined the network. The setups that survive contact with real children use both, so each layer covers the other’s blind spot.
Setting it up: three layers
1. Start at the router
Do this first, because it’s the only layer that protects devices you haven’t thought about. Most modern routers have some form of built-in content filtering; if yours doesn’t, network-wide filtering can be applied by changing the DNS settings on the router to a family-filtering service.
Either way, the effect is the same: filtering applies to the whole network. A device doesn’t need to be configured to be covered — it just has to be connected.
One thing to be aware of: this covers devices on your Wi-Fi. A phone with mobile data can step off your network entirely, which is exactly why the next two layers matter.
2. Microsoft Family Safety on Windows
Set up each child with their own child account linked to your Microsoft account — not a local account, and not sharing yours. That link is what makes the whole thing enforceable, because changing the settings then requires your password.
From there you can set app and game age limits, web filtering, screen-time schedules per device, and weekly activity reports. Take the time to set the schedule realistically — controls that are obviously unreasonable get worked around rather than accepted.
3. Apple Screen Time and Family Sharing
On iPads and iPhones, set up Family Sharing first so the children’s Apple accounts sit under yours, then configure Screen Time per child: downtime hours, app limits, and content restrictions.
The step people miss: set a Screen Time passcode that is different from the device unlock code. If they match — and by default people often make them match — then the child already knows the passcode and can lift every restriction in about fifteen seconds. This single oversight accounts for a huge share of the “we set it up but it stopped working” cases we’re called about.
A realistic checklist
- Filtering configured at the router, so new and reset devices are covered by default
- Every child on their own account, linked to a parent account
- Parent password known only to the parents
- Screen Time passcode different from the unlock code
- Consoles and smart TVs included — they reach the same internet
- Time limits agreed with older children rather than imposed silently
- A note in the calendar to revisit the settings next school year
That last one matters more than it sounds. Limits that are right for a seven-year-old become something a thirteen-year-old resents and routes around, and a setup nobody revisits is a setup that gets switched off.
If you’d rather not do it yourself
Getting this right across a mixed household of Windows laptops, iPads, phones and consoles is fiddly — not difficult exactly, but there are a lot of small settings in a lot of different menus, and the ones that matter most are the easiest to miss.
We set up family online safety as an onsite visit across South West London, usually within the hour: filtering at the router, accounts and limits on every device, and a walkthrough so you can adjust things yourself as your children get older. See our cybersecurity services or onsite IT support, or call 020 7610 0500.
You can also read how this worked for a local family in our case study on setting up parental controls across a whole household in Mortlake SW14.
